ABSTRACT

The Internet has radically shifted how people access information. Instead of storing information internally, increasingly, people outsource to the Internet and retrieve it when needed. While this is an efficient strategy in many ways, its downstream consequences remain largely unexplored. This research examines how accessing online information impacts how people remember information in a learning context. Across five experiments, participants studied for a quiz either by searching online to access relevant information or by directly receiving that same information without online search. Those who searched the Internet performed worse in the learning assessment, indicating that they stored less new knowledge in internal memory. However, participants who searched the Internet were as confident, or even more confident, that they had mastered the study material compared to those who did not search online. We argue that, by making information retrievability salient, Internet search reduces the likelihood of information being stored in memory. Further, these results suggest that searching online leads to the misattribution of online information to internal memory, thus masking the Internet-induced learning deficits.

摘要

互联网从根本上改变了人们获取信息的方式。人们越来越多地不再在内部存储信息，而是将信息外包给 Internet 并在需要时检索它。虽然这在许多方面都是一种有效的策略，但其下游后果在很大程度上仍未得到探索。本研究探讨了访问在线信息如何影响人们在学习环境中记忆信息的方式。在五个实验中，参与者通过在线搜索以访问相关信息或直接接收相同信息而不进行在线搜索来研究测验。那些上网搜索的人在学习评估中表现更差，这表明他们在内部记忆中存储的新知识较少。然而，在互联网上搜索的参与者同样自信，甚至更加自信，与不在线搜索的人相比，他们已经掌握了学习材料。我们认为，通过突出信息可检索性，互联网搜索降低了信息存储在内存中的可能性。此外，这些结果表明，在线搜索会导致在线信息错误地归因于内部记忆，从而掩盖了互联网引起的学习缺陷。